“I guess it’s gotten to me after all,” Russ Schafer conceded, gesturing toward his involuntarily shaking hand. Schafer, who requested a pseudonym in order to avoid workplace retaliation, has worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for more than 20 years. He’s trying to hold on to his job and refused “the fork” — the voluntary resignations pushed by the Trump administration in February, so-called because the subject line of the email to federal employees, “Fork in the Road,” was nearly the same as one sent to Twitter employees in 2022 by the company’s then-new owner, Elon Musk.

“I’m just unwilling to walk away from my work. It’ll take a much bigger bribe to get me to give up on that,” Schafer told me. He lamented that due to decreased funding and staffing at the EPA over the years, he is no longer able to initiate large-scale regulatory efforts or sustain long-term work on “big cases that didn’t generate beans,” as he had in the early days of his career. Nevertheless, Schafer said, “If I’m around and we decide to do something on some of the things I’m tracking that represent a huge environmental risk, I want to be there to do something.”

But tens of thousands of workers have found that neither refusing the fork nor having union and legal protections has shielded them from the mass layoffs. A slew of arcane and clinically termed “reductions in force” is tearing through government agencies. After about 76,000 fork resignations came the illegal terminations of thousands of probationary employees, followed by mass reductions in force wielded against entire offices and departments. The most brazen attack yet came via executive order in late March, putting an end to collective bargaining rights for at least a million federal employees.

The bloodbath at the Department of Health and Human Services, where some 10,000 employees were summarily let go without notice on April 1, bears the sudden and chaotic markings of what have by now become familiar refrains. Dozens of National Institutes of Health employees posted on Reddit: “17 years of service. Entire office let go”; “This was my dream job”; “devastated”; “Ten years of service, I worked my butt off”; “I have a headache that is throbbing. My coworkers and I broke down crying”; and on and on. Now much of the infrastructure, research, and services of the U.S. health system, already frail, are in danger of collapse.

The government is currently at war with what it has vilified as its own “bureaucracy,” in lockstep with Project 2025’s stated aims to outlaw public sector unions and rewrite decades of labor law. In a 2024 speech, Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect and now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

With Donald Trump in the White House and his billionaire hatchet man, Musk, deployed, the implementation of Project 2025’s vision seems imminent. Trump is attempting the largest order of mass layoffs in U.S. history, eclipsing the worst instances of corporate job cuts. As the country’s largest employer, the government has over three million employees. Decimating this work force will have enormous knock-on effects, and hit those groups disproportionately represented — veterans and African Americans — hardest.

Despite Trump’s now-rote rhetoric about a ballooning and omnipotent deep state, he is waging war on an already diminished bureaucracy. For decades, the federal work force and the programs it delivers have been steadily eroded through incremental bipartisan clawbacks. Government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was relatively stable in the postwar years, but it began to dive in 1975, dropping from 23 percent to 17 percent today. Meanwhile, public sector workers as a percentage of the labor force have followed a similar decline. Unionization among public workers continues to be much denser than among their private counterparts, but it also slipped to 25 percent as of last year, down from 30 percent in 1989.

At the same time, the labor movement has pivoted away from confrontational tactics, like strikes, workplace actions, and mass picketing, effectively tying its own hands in the face of attacks. Mark Smith, a 39-year-old occupational therapist with Veterans Affairs and president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1, told me that the federal sector has been like the proverbial frog sitting in a slowly warming pot of water, unaware that it’s being boiled to death. Federal unions and the public at large have allowed decades of underfunding, creeping privatization, and vilification of government employees to go largely unheeded.

But alongside likely historic defeats, stirrings from within the ranks of government employees are providing a spark of hope. As federal unions are engaged in necessary legal battles that may take months or years to wind through the courts, a scrappy but growing Federal Unionists Network has provided a fulcrum for rank-and-file members who don’t want to wait to resist.

What began in 2022 as an ad hoc group of fewer than two dozen union members has grown into an organization of hundreds of active members, a network of more than 15,000 workers, and a developing infrastructure to organize and train leaders within every federal union in the country, just at the moment when the warming pot is no longer tepid. As Smith noted, the executive branch has thrown a bomb into the pot, giving everyone an incentive to do something. The introduction of new forces onto the battleground might succeed in notching a few defensive wins in the present. Perhaps most important, it has the potential to lay the groundwork for a more potent labor movement in the years to come.

As Paul Osadebe, a union steward at American Federation of Government Employees Local 476 and a FUN leader, put it to a couple of thousand federal workers on an emergency organizing call: “There’s no one who’s going to come in and save us at the end of all of this. But you do have the power to save yourself.” Organizing, he explained, is “not some specialized thing. It’s not something that other people do. It’s something that you can do.”

“I’ve been eating a lot of egg tacos,” Jasmine McAllister laughed, as she explained the daily realities of organizing while unemployed. “I'm spending my energy doing this.” She pointed to the picket of federal workers behind us at New York City’s Federal Plaza. “And trying to remember to pet my cat and see my husband and stuff.” It was just a month before that McAllister had received a termination notice to her personal email, addressed to “[EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName],” the product of a failed mail merge. She was among dozens of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau probationary employees who received identical emails on Feb. 11, part of the first wave of terminations aimed at probationary employees. Two months later, nearly the entire agency was laid off in a legally contested reduction in force.

But within an hour of receiving the email, fired workers got on a video call. “We got fired at 9 p.m.,” she told me. “Ten p.m. we’re like, OK, let’s get out there tomorrow.” By noon they had almost 100 people assembled in downtown Manhattan. McAllister and her co-workers had seen the writing on the wall and had been talking for weeks. That first picket included just CFPB employees. But after a FUN-initiated national day of action on Feb. 19, McAllister and others connected with the network, and through it met workers at other agencies. Their pickets became multi-agency, drawing on the alphabet soup of federal agencies from the SEC to the EPA to the FTC and others.

The organizers who founded FUN first got to know each other in 2022 through a campaign initiated by Chris Dols, president of Local 98 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Dols and a handful of others sought to pressure Congress to confirm President Joe Biden’s Federal Labor Relations Authority nominees. The FLRA governs federal labor relations (as the National Labor Relations Board does for the private sector) but was still controlled by Trump nominees during Biden’s tenure, despite a Democratic majority in Congress. Had Congress pushed to confirm Biden’s nominees, it would have ensured a more union-friendly board. And more important, the campaign’s organizers asserted in a Labor Notes op-ed, the process of campaigning for Biden’s nominees, regardless of whether it was successful, could be a stepping stone to “cohere a national cohort of the next generation of government union leaders — and the years ahead could be full of experiments in creative, local- and member-led federal unionism.”

That’s how Mark Smith first got pulled into the future FUN’s orbit. Dols was making cold calls, reaching out to contacts at union locals around the country about the FLRA campaign. “He just called and said, ‘Hey, how’s it going in your local?’” Smith recalled. And then, Smith explained, Dols just listened. “Classic good organizer, right? And I told him all the problems and all my frustrations and how you feel sort of isolated and under-resourced.” Smith added, “He listened and I talked a lot, and then he talked about this campaign and how I could get involved in it.”

In the end, their campaign did not succeed. Neither did a 2024 run for the national IFPTE executive board by Dols and fellow FUN leader Colin Smalley. But both campaigns highlighted the need to prepare for a future Republican offensive and likely Democratic inaction, and both built networks and organizing infrastructure. “We said it again and again in the campaign,” Dols told me. “We don’t know if it’ll be in one year or in five years or in nine years, but there will be another Republican administration, and they are going to declare war on the federal sector.”

By the time Trump was re-elected in November 2024, FUN had almost 200 members and was growing rapidly. The network’s numbers might have accounted for a tiny fraction of the more than a million federal union members, but as government workers, they had a lot of experience getting things done with few resources. FUN managed to draw thousands of feds, as they call themselves, to more than 20 towns and cities around the country during its Feb. 19 national day of action. The event got a lot of media coverage and made a big splash within the labor movement and among progressive groups. It positioned FUN’s membership as people ready to fight just as “everybody was finally realizing we need to actually fight,” as Dols put it. It would not be enough, he continued, to “keep our head down and hope they just don’t come for us.”

In the weeks that followed, as word spread about the day of action, FUN continued its outreach work, and national unions and progressive organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible promoted the network. FUN has now reached a spread that roughly corresponds with the geographic diversity of the federal sector itself, its numbers have surpassed 15,000, and mass calls — some of which have featured leaders from the national federal unions, alongside AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and other private sector leaders — have drawn thousands more.

At the heart of FUN’s organizing strategy is what the labor activist and academic Eric Blanc calls “worker-to-worker organizing.” Blanc has argued that if unions hope to turn around labor’s decline, they will need to shift away from top-down, staff-driven approaches. Instead, worker-leaders can be recruited and developed, and can themselves strategize on the ground, gain information and experience, and bring in others to do the same. FUN is raising money and bringing on staff members with experience in this sort of organizing. At town hall meetings of federal workers and on organizing calls, FUN activists break down how to talk to co-workers about organizing. Rank-and-file members share stories about how they organized rallies and actions at their locals, many for the first time in their lives. One union member in Utah — highlighting how little he knew about where to begin — recalled using ChatGPT to come up with a rally agenda. Another union member in Seattle had helped organize science fiction conventions in the past but had never been involved in labor organizing. But in 2025 she and a group of other workers connected through the FUN planned happy hours that became organizing centers for large protests. With this type of organizing, the labor movement can extend its outreach beyond what small numbers of union staffers can reasonably be expected to do around the country.

The ideas that drove the formation of FUN — creative initiatives, a rank-and-file organizing model, and the need for networks and solidarity across the many unions and agencies that make up the federal work force — are critical not only to combat Trump’s charge but also to challenge decades of actions against federal employees and services. Federal workers have never had the same rights as workers in the private sector, and have been villainized by both mainstream parties and numerous administrations. This history created the conditions that allowed the current attacks to happen.

The country’s defining labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, left federal employees out of the guarantees that were recognized for other workers: the ability to negotiate and strike over wages, hours, and conditions of employment. It wasn’t until 1962 that federal unions were even recognized, via an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy. This recognition was only enshrined into law in 1978 via the Civil Service Reform Act.

But the CSRA guarantees a scope of bargaining only over conditions of employment, while denying federal workers the right to negotiate over pay and benefits. Public sector unions are also required to operate in an “open shop” environment, meaning that although the union must fairly represent all employees, those employees are not automatically dues-paying union members. Government employees had already been denied the right to strike in previous legislation, and are even prohibited from “asserting” the right to strike.

In what became a defining moment for federal workers and the labor movement at large, President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. As members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the air traffic controllers made aggressive demands regarding pay and workplace conditions, and they explicitly challenged the illegality of strike actions.

But when Reagan fired the workers and decertified the union, PATCO found itself isolated from the rest of the labor movement and unable to win mass public support. PATCO became synonymous with labor’s historic defeat in the neoliberal era. In signaling to American businesses that it was time to pursue a no-holds-barred strikebreaking offensive against unions, Reagan forced a final nail into the coffin of labor’s retreat — in both the public and private sectors. Greyhound, Bridgestone/Firestone, and other large private companies took their cue from the White House and permanently replaced their unionized striking workers.

The labor movement had been on the ascendancy in the 1960s and ’70s. But after breaking PATCO and with the help of the Federal Reserve, which unleashed high unemployment and an engineered recession, the government was able to effectively suppress union militancy by the 1980s. Union membership steeply declined, and confrontational tactics like strikes were all but retired in the decades that followed. By the turn of the 21st century labor had pivoted to lobbying, legal actions, and an overall defensive, risk-averse posture. In exchange for relative labor peace, bosses were willing to provide modest wage and benefit increases. Unions chugged along, amassing dues and maintaining their own financial health.

Nowhere has this social contract been clearer than in the public sector, where the government offered long-term stability for workers who managed to get into that work force. In exchange, they whittled back funding and increased subcontracting with little resistance, while union leaders largely treated politicians as allies to lobby rather than bosses.

Federal sector locals, Smith told me, “are notoriously sleepy and moribund. There are hundreds of dead locals that were chartered at some point but have no officers or meetings. They just don’t exist. They’re there technically, but there’s no activity.” When Smith first became a shop steward at his local, he found that nobody was talking about the union, and many didn’t know they had a contract or what a union is. “It just sort of felt to me like we could be doing so much more. We have all of these incredibly talented and smart and hardworking clinical staff and health care workers who are just untapped.”

The problem is largely structural. In addition to the legal constraints enforced upon federal unions, the government work force is also fragmented across agencies and unions. The “traditional model of well-defined jurisdictions and unions that avoid stepping on each other’s toes,” Smalley argued in a recent interview, “that can be really counterproductive to building sectoral power in the federal government.”

In response, and in the context of a broadly more passive and disorganized labor movement, federal unions have fallen mostly into a service model of unionism. In negotiations they have emphasized a model of bargaining for the “impact and implementation” of items that have been deemed outside of their purview. They can negotiate over the procedures and processes by which changes are implemented, but not the changes themselves. Absent a vision for how to push against those boundaries — whether that’s through political fights to change the terms of what is negotiable or through creative actions that find adaptable ways to organize within the realm of permissibility — unions are consigned to accepting the rollback of working conditions.

Smith recounted examples of multibillion-dollar contracts to outsource nursing and other jobs in Veterans Affairs. Bargaining over impact and implementation seems woefully insufficient in response. “And then we’ll just quietly go on our way?” Smith asked. “And I’m sort of thinking to myself: That’s it? We’re not gonna take some kind of action or at least talk to the people affected by these decisions, use our union platform as a bully pulpit to raise these issues to the public?”

Trump is attempting to deliver a greater public flogging to the U.S. labor movement than even Reagan’s historic firing of air traffic controllers managed to achieve. He is also operating with few of the niceties that Reagan skillfully weaved into his assault to build public support. Reagan framed the PATCO strike as an act of greedy insubordination and successfully isolated the union. The air traffic controllers, for their part, were militant and confident, but in overestimating their own strength they did little to build public support or practical solidarity from other wings of the labor movement. According to a 1981 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approved of Reagan’s firings, while 30 percent disapproved. More than two-thirds thought air traffic controllers shouldn’t be allowed to strike.

Trump’s March 27 order to end collective bargaining rights for most federal employees, on the other hand, emphasized the president’s individual political agenda. He openly targets unions for “fighting back” against him, filing numerous grievances and obstructing his efforts rather than working with him. He indicated that he will pursue “constructive partnerships with unions who work with” him — that is, those who acquiesce to his agenda. Where Reagan sought legal directives and the support of public sentiment to fuel his right-wing backlash, Trump is using executive orders to confuse and demoralize his opposition.

But federal workers today are much more popular than either Trump or Musk. According to a March NBC News poll, half of the registered voters surveyed view federal workers positively, while 21 percent view them negatively. The reverse is true of Musk, with 51 percent holding negative views of him and 39 percent positive. Unions, meanwhile, remain the most trusted institutions left in this country. According to an August 2024 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, far higher than approval ratings for the president, Congress, big business, and the media.

Many people believe the public sector should be doing more, not less. This sentiment is likely to grow as more people feel the direct impact of the attacks. Twenty-seven percent of NBC’s March poll respondents said that they or someone they know had “been negatively impacted by reductions or cuts to federal benefits, programs, or services as a result of changes enacted by DOGE,” and another 14 percent said they or someone they know is a federal employee who had been laid off as a result of DOGE’s attacks.

By taking aim at the whole of public services and government jobs, the Trump-Musk-Vought troika is targeting public services that millions of people depend on: Social Security, veterans’ medical facilities, public lands, and post offices. But the jobs themselves are just as popular. For millions of people, getting a government job has meant that you “made it” — a chance for lifelong work, security, good benefits, and dignity — contributing toward the public good. “Elon Musk and all these billionaires,” McAllister put it, “are like cartoon evil characters of what an evil boss is like. They want people to work at factories and tech workers working 80 hours a week to optimize different things stealing our attention.” They’re trying to create an environment, she explained, to undermine workers’ high expectations of what a job should provide. “The idea that you can have a job where you’re helping people and you have a stable life with normal, humane hours — just the idea that’s the type of job that can exist is very threatening to them.”

Because the government faces public scrutiny and accountability in ways that the private sector rarely has, it has been pushed to use its own hiring practices to chip away at the country’s cavernous racial wealth gap. Today, nearly one in five federal workers are Black, and while it is far from true to claim that government work has equalized the racial wealth gap, it has provided an island of economic security to hundreds of thousands of Black families. A 2020 paper by the Center for American Progress found that the median Black households headed by private sector workers held less than 10 percent of the wealth of their median white counterparts. In the public sector, Black median household wealth climbed to 37 percent of that held by white families. Public sector jobs have provided Black workers — along with women and other constituencies facing persistent labor market discrimination — a ladder into the middle class.

When I spoke with Sam Kerns, a lifelong public employee close to retirement, he reminded me that Vought is now effectively the boss of all federal employees. “I don’t know if his definition of a bureaucrat includes employees like me or if, in his mind, a bureaucrat is a particular type of federal employee,” Kerns said, “but he was already committed to bringing trauma into the lives of federal employees before he was nominated and approved to be the director of the human resources arm of the federal government.”

Kerns, an African American man who grew up in South Carolina, first got his foot through the door of the federal sector in 1977. He spent a year at a junior college, then transferred to Clemson University after receiving a scholarship that aimed to increase the representation of women and minorities in engineering and the sciences. At Clemson as a chemical engineering major, he participated in a cooperative education program, one of many that the federal government had heavily invested in to help underrepresented students get paid work experience and college credits while doing work related to their field of study. While on assignment, students had the opportunity to see if their majors suited them in the real world. They were also given access to experiences and relationships that could set them on a clear career path.

Kerns was assigned to work at the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal–era federally owned electric utility corporation. “That’s how my federal career began when I was still in college,” he said. Ten years later, while still working at TVA, he got a fellowship that funded a postgraduate degree in environmental science and management. He was assigned a job at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and eventually settled into decades of work at the EPA’s hazardous waste program. He proudly explained his role to me as ensuring that businesses that generate, store, or dispose of hazardous waste comply with safety regulations for the sake of public health.

Trump may be overplaying his hand. We’re still early in the battle, and federal workers are just one part of a deepening and widening opposition to the systematic dismantling of government services and democratic rights. Anti-Trump protests in 2025 began smaller than the mass marches we saw at the start of his first term in 2017, but they’re growing. Organizers said that millions of people flooded the streets on April 5 at more than 1,200 locations across all 50 states, organized by more than 150 groups. And as Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam from the Crowd Counting Consortium point out, even apart from the size, protests are far more numerous, frequent, and strategically confrontational than those eight years ago.

So far, the scrappy but growing unionists network FUN has succeeded at tapping into the anger and desire to organize that is surfacing all about. The numbers and political power necessary to stop Trump’s attacks will require the group to scale up as quickly as possible. It will also require union leaders in both the public and private sectors to continue to support FUN’s efforts, and even more so to call out the kinds of numbers that they’re capable of mobilizing. Thus far the rallies and even mass protests have seen rank-and-file and local union turnout but not mass union mobilizations. Union leaders can also use their connections to pressure Democratic politicians to deploy the vast resources at their disposal — money, lists, campaign tools — to mobilize constituents as well, and to do so in support of congressional actions that throw sand in the gears and threaten to shut down the government if necessary. Both Democrats and union leaders could take inspiration from FUN — or from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and hold mass town halls in every county in the country. The left more broadly must also build practical solidarity between communities affected by shattered public services and institutions.

The federal work force, like much of the country, is in a do-or-die moment. As Osadebe put it, “When you take collective actions, you can build the power to stop everything that's happening and create a crisis for the administration. Because they think they can just act towards us, and we’re just going to sit here and take it.” But, he added,“ I’m not going to take it, and I know you out there are not going to take it, either.”